Joined Socialbakers right after its first seed of investment ($1M), having around 30 employees, exactly zero designers & one product (an analytical tool for social media).
I went through all ups & downs of transforming a startup into a mature company with 600+ employees and $55M+ ARR. The overall user experience of our SaaS platform - Socialbakers Suite - is often the reason clients choose us over competition and stay with us.
I've hired every single member of my team (22+): an awesome multi-disciplinary product, branding, visual & motion designers combined with UX researchers and UX writer🙂
Some of the highlights and events we established, built & designed over the years ...
- Built many new products, sunset some and then built another ones
- Eventually merged all of our products into a unified platform
- Redesigned products and website(s) and microsites and whatnot
- Designed mobile apps that were never made (good strategy, bad execution of that strategy)
- Rebranded the whole company (once) and updated the logo (many times)
- Designed & rebranded many events
- Had more than 1000 projects & prototypes in InVision before jumping into Figma
- Made dozens of videos and visuals and ads, ... (stil love this one)
- Switched from Adobe to Sketch to Figma (40+ editors, 150+ viewers)
- Maintained many UI kits and then kicked off a huge design system(2016)
- ... the list could go forever
... and few thoughts about my approach to leading & building a design team
- I've always preffered clever & passionate "juniors" from seniors (one of my best designers came from a Ministry of Education 🤓) ...
- ... but I also hate generalization: every single person is special!
- Everyone evolves - visual designers moving to full-time motion, UX to UI, etc.
- Totally diverse team in their approach to design - it creates a wonderful dynamic
(I hate how some "leaders" want to have a bunch of "slaves" who just do what they tell them) - Always encouraged designers to do side-projects as it helps to chill out a bit (product design can be quite exhausting)
- Design reviews, design studios, design sprints, design syncs with devs/PM's, ...
- Sharing (almost oversharing) + feedback gathering & receiving
- Data, data, data & business goals
- Soft-skills don't exist anymore: every designer should be able to not be an ass*ole
Check our Dribbble (probably just 1% of our work😂) or just visit our website, browse our social, try our product, ...